Here’s another one of those articles where I dissect the goings on at a few European clubs, in order to convince people (including myself) that Everton can do something along those lines. I will not succeed, of course, but god loves a trier.
Although the Champions League Final and (most) of Europe’s major leagues have been won by the richest club, there have been some really encouraging performances by well-run (rather than well-rich) clubs.
Let’s have a butchers at what they have been up to..,
Bayer Leverkusen
Finished 1st as the first unbeaten side ever in Bundesliga history after scoring loads of goals and playing brilliant football under Xabi Alonso.
This comes after selling their best player of 2022-23 season, Moussa Diaby, to Villa for £50M.
Although Alonso is clearly an excellent manager, no team wins titles without good recruitment. As much as they are good buyers, Leverkusen are very good sellers. They are also very good developers of exceptional talent.
Their biggest signing of the summer, Diaby’s replacement, was Saints and Burnley star Nathan Tella who set them back £20M. That is pretty much their upper limit on spending on any one player. Most are between £10M and £20M and sourced from weaker leagues (Brazil, Argentina, Czechia, Belgium, Portugal and Scotland) or, like Diaby himself, rich club reserves (in his case, PSG). A few, generally sub £10M players are sourced from within Germany itself. These are generally Steady Eddies – comparable to the likes of Phil Neville, say.
Many of the players they spend real money on are very high-ceiling big talents aged between about 19 and 22. They buy players who have the ability, though not the track record, to play in the Champions League. And good on them, they have done it in fine style.
Stuttgart
Finished 2nd, ahead of a Bayern Munich side with Harry Kane, Thomas Muller, Leroy Sane, Kingsley Coman, Jamal Musiala, Joshua Kimmich, Alphonso Davies, Dayot Upamecano, Kim Min-Jae, Mattias DeLigt and Manuel Neuer.
They spent £20M in total last summer, after recouping £50M in transfer fees. Their biggest outlay was Guirassy of Rennes, a striker we have been regularly linked with over the years, for £9M. They have been spending less than about half what they generate in transfer fees for some years now – and most signings are between £2.5M and £10M.
You’ll never guess what, they source players from low-cost markets (Argentina, Croatia, Austria, Belgium), rich club reserves – and also pay modest fees for Steady Eddie Germans. They work the free and loan market pretty hard too.
Their manager Sebastian Hoeness takes an awful lot of credit after also performing very well at Hoffenheim. An ex-Bayern youth team coach, he is probably in with an outside chance of the vacant Bayern job this summer.
Girona
But for our old pal Carlo Ancelotti, Girona might well have won La Liga this season. They ended up finishing 3rd, just 4 points off Barca.
Their recruitment has been inspired. You might notice a pattern here but it involves buying players from low-cost markets (Ukraine, Colombia), hitting the loan and free market hard, and picking up players from rich club reserves.
Their biggest ever fee was spent last summer on (now 26-year-old) Ukrainian striker Artem Dovbyk – who we were pretty strongly linked with after a fairly good (but not spectacular) spell for SK Dnipro. He cost £7M. He then scored 21 in 35 in La Liga. Incidentally, that is second only to the 23 goals former Crystal Palace flop Alexander Sorloth scored for Villarreal this season.
Anyway, in recruitment, Girona have a huge advantage as forming part of the Manchester City stable – and therefore have access to players like Savio (from Manchester City affiliate club Troyes in France), and Yan Couto on loan direct from Man City. Both Brazilians have been absolutely exceptional.
They also have an excellent manager, that is true, but like Leverkusen in particular they have sourced players who have the technical ability and potential to play Champions League football (even on a shoestring). They have not sourced average players – other than very low cost Steady Eddies to supplement the real flair.
Atalanta
There’s a strong Everton connection here because they won the Europa League Final (against Leverkusen) with an Ademola Lookman hat-trick.
But the real reason they won was the recruitment and player development strategy which feeds the first team with excellent players. Players good enough to hand Liverpool a sound thrashing, no less.
Until recently, they have been a bit like the other clubs mentioned, sourcing players for no more than about £20M. This season, they have taken that up a notch to the £25M to £30M mark – basically because they can. They’ve been trading players for some years now and it has given them the financial muscle to buy the likes of El-Bilal Toure (who we very nearly got instead of Beto) and Scamacca (who had failed at West Ham). These two replaced the outgoing Hojlund. They still (as they pretty much always do) spent much less than they generated in transfer fees though.
When you look at the source of the players they buy, they focus very hard on youth / reserves from their much richer domestic rivals (Juventus, AC Milan and Inter Milan), the Italian lower leagues plus a little bit from the Premier League, Brazil, Belgium, Russia and the Netherlands – but always hunting for value (low cost but Champions League ability). They also have a top-notch academy, which they recruit into very heavily through international scouting that found the likes of Amad Diallo and Dejan Kulusevski.
This is not like the sort of international scouting we’ve done little bits of – this is committing pretty big money £3.5M on Kulusevski when he was a 16-year-old playing for a minor Swedish club’s youth team (but on the strength of performances for Sweden and Macedonia U15 and U16 sides).
Despite being adjacent geographically to Milan and Turin, Atalanta do well with Italian youth too with the top graduate being 21-year-old Giorgio Scalvini (the Italian Branthwaite).
What about Everton?
Well, the German and Spanish sides have managers who play a pretty punchy, aggressive attacking game. These are undoubtedly more progressive managers than Dyche and each are in with a very good shout of landing a job with more established Champions League sides.
Dyche, people may have observed, is pretty conservative and plays a tactically astute and extremely well-organised defensive, counter-attacking side. This is designed to make the most of players who generally do not have the technical ability and potential to play Champions League football. We do have talent, absolutely we do, but not really where it counts when it comes to constructive football – ie, at full-back, Number 10 and wing forwards.
Dyche is possibly more like Gasperini at Atalanta – a wise but unspectacular manager who gets a lot out of the players at his disposal. Whilst I do not expect Dyche to ever replicate the free-flowing artistry of Alonso’s Leverkusen this season, he can do a heck of a lot better with better players. I really hope we get to see it.
The other comment I expect will be that these examples are of clubs from weaker leagues where it is easier to pull this sort of thing off. There is some truth in this, although Atalanta’s demolition of Liverpool shows that these are good sides. The Premier League is much hyped but the quality is patchy.
Atalanta’s ability to run a leading academy under the noses of neighbours Juventus, AC Milan and Inter Milan is also encouraging.
The examples above show (and I hope prove) that extremely good quality players can be sourced to fill these problem positions for us at low cost. Doing so doesn’t feed the vanity of fans who would like us to be competing for household names – but it has worked wonders for four clubs who have quietly and quickly assembled very good squads of players. It isn’t a quick fix but, since we’ve been waiting about 35 years, I reckon it’s worth waiting a little longer.
Alas, these clubs will not keep it going indefinitely without the financial clout of richer rivals. They might even drop down into mid-table next time around. However, being penniless, it would be a bit remiss to ignore how they (and other clubs like them who outperform) have gone about laying the foundations for this remarkable season.
I have said on other threads that, if Leverkusen were to sell Branthwaite, I am very confident they would replace him with Martin Vitik of Sparta Prague – who would cost about £15M. Vitik is, like Branthwaite, a tall, fast and aggressive 21-year-old with excellent technical skills. He also has Champions League and International experience already. They wouldn’t spend, say, £30M on a player who has already peaked even if such a player would provide a more consistent, dependable immediate presence in the First XI.
It needn’t be Vitik, of course, but we can adopt a similar approach to these three clubs when sourcing a replacement for Branthwaite – and building up the rest of the squad with our meagre kitty. Another nice thought to end on is that Leverkusen’s success comes just 3 years after they sold Kai Havertz, then their finest talent since Michael Ballack, to Chelsea for £75M (he’s since been overtaken by the magnificent Florian Wirtz).
Atalanta’s success comes a year after selling Hojlund to Man Utd and two years after selling Romero to Spurs. If we must sell Branthwaite, and despite calls for defiance, it does look strongly like “we must”, then it needn’t be all doom and gloom for the future.